April 14, 2010

In 1992, Sinead O’Connor ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live as a protest against paedophilia in the Catholic Church and the complicity of the church hierarchy. It was viewed as an act of career suicide. The following day, steamrollers crushed hundreds of her CDs outside Rockefeller Center to huge cheers from protesters. On the next SNL, presenter Joe Pesci quipped that “if it had been my show, I would have gave her such a smack.”

I remember her doing this back then, but I was in my early teens & didn't quite know it was about paedophilia.

..even the most outlandish allegations O’Connor made against the Catholic Church eighteen years ago seem pretty tame in comparison to what we now know to have occurred. And in the wake of the most recent wave of revelations, which have implicated the current Pope, the US media seems belatedly to have acknowledged as much.

Only in adulthood did I finally understand why my father (an atheist) never allowed my brother to serve as an altar boy (we were raised Catholic. Long story.)

The comments are an interesting read. This one stood out:

"Sinead is definitely due an apology. 38 years ago my father warned me never to be alone with a priest or take a lift from one. This was before I went to Irish College which was run by the priests. He told me that they lived very unnatural lives and that some of them preyed on children and did bad things to them. I took his advise. Lots of people knew what was going on even then."